AMD Outs Six Core 'Thuban' Desktop Processor

It is IDF week and our mighty editor Riyad is currently in San Francisco as we speak. So we trust the timing of this announcement from AMD isn't accidental...

The chip maker has announced 'Thuban', a six core desktop processor which follows on from the six core Opteron CPUs we saw back in June. Most exciting is Thuban should be released in early 2010 and will also be backwards compatible with current AM2+ and AM3 motherboards. Eat that Core i5 and i7. On top of this Thuban will be built using 45nm technology, feature an integrated DDR3 controller plus 3MB and 6MB of Level 2 and Level 3 cache respectively.

"We are all about platform longevity and long-lived upgrade paths," said an AMD spokesperson to Maximum PC in a clearly aimed jab at its rival. By contrast Intel has three socket form factors on the market right now which are all incompatible with one another.

Maximum PC also reveals that Thuban is set to be a 346mm2 chip with 904 million transistors. This compares to 731m on the 262mm2 die Core i7-975 Extreme Edition and 774m on the 296mm2 die Core i5-750. Thuban will face competition from Intel 'Gulftown' - set to be Core i9 - a 12 thread chipset with six cores and six more courtesy of HyperThreading.